The
Mississippi River Valley in the Southern states, where levees had been
damaged by the Civil War, experienced severe flooding in 1865, 1867,
1874, and 1882. The latter was the most severe, and is depicted in
this Harper's Weekly cartoon by Thomas Nast. In it, King
Neptune releases his ruthless force through the deluge of the
Mississippi River, engulfing tiny villages along its unrestrained
path. In the background, the female personification of the South
seeks the protection of Columbia (representing the federal government).

In
the decades following the Civil War, little was accomplished in the
Mississippi River Valley of the South to prevent the damage to the
natural and built environment that occurred during the periodic
floods. Missouri constructed few levees until the 1880s. The
Arkansas and Louisiana state governments made attempts to address the
problem, but were largely unsuccessful. In 1869, the Arkansas
legislature placed levee construction under the authority of the
Commission on Public Works and Internal Improvements, but the
relationship between the commission and construction companies was
fraught with fraud. The Louisiana legislature tried several schemes,
assigning the duty first to the Board of Public Works, then to a private
corporation (Louisiana Levee Company), and finally to the Board of State
Engineers. Millions of tax-dollars were funneled into the projects
with few results.

Only in the state of Mississippi was some progress made on levee
construction between the Civil War and the 1882 flood. In 1865, a
group of planters in the lower Delta formed a regional board to oversee
the raising of monies and the repair of the levees. In 1877, the
state legislature set up the Mississippi Levee District to assist
them. Mississippians led the charge for federal aid, and Congress
responded in 1879 by establishing the Mississippi River
Commission. The federal agency's mission was to enhance the
river's navigability, but it offered some aid to levee boards.

The great flood of 1882 ravaged communities along the Mississippi and
Ohio Rivers and their tributaries. In Cincinnati, heavy rains
began on Sunday night, February 19, 1882, and lasted for two days,
causing the Ohio River to rise at a rate of two inches per hour.
The flood blocked railroad tracks entering the city, submerged homes and
factories, displaced hundreds of families and put thousands out of work
temporarily. Similar scenes occurred along the Ohio in southern
Indiana and Illinois.

Even more serious was the flooding along the Mississippi River, from
Illinois and St. Louis virtually all the way down to the delta of New
Orleans. The 1882 flood was one of the most devastating to the
lower Mississippi River Valley. The water easily broke through
most of the levees, burying entire towns, killing livestock and other
animals, and forcing thousands of residents to flee for safety. In
Arkansas alone, an estimated 20,000 people were left homeless. In
some places the overflowing Mississippi River transformed the adjacent
communities into a lake, 15-miles wide. Private steamboat
companies rescued those stranded by the flood, as did the Army Corps of
Engineers and the Quartermaster Corps, which also distributed rations to
the victims.

The political wake of the 1882 flood flowed into a Congressional
debate over the annual rivers and harbors bill. Little federal aid
had been given to what were called the "internal improvements"
of the nation's rivers and harbors before the Civil War. In the
post-war years, however, funding rose significantly to nearly $4,000,000
each year, 1866-1875. The annual rivers and harbors bill, however,
became pork-barrel legislation in the House (where spending bills
originate) as Congressmen tacked appropriations for their favorite
projects onto the bill.

Despite calls for increased aid because of the recent flood, on
August 1, 1882, President Chester Arthur vetoed the Rivers and Harbors
Bill, explicitly labeling it pork-barrel legislation. Arthur did
not oppose internal improvements on principle, and had endorsed the
commission's report calling for federal aid to repair and extend levees
along the Mississippi. However, he concluded that the legislation as drafted
only benefited select localities, was not in the national interest, and
would set a bad precedent for the "extravagant expenditure of
public money."

Led by a coalition of Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans
from flood states, Congress overrode the president's veto. The
1882 Rivers and Harbors Act included $5.4 million for the Mississippi
River Commission. For the rest of the century, federal
appropriations for rivers and harbors rose from $8,000,000 in 1880 to
$29,000,000 in 1898. The levees rebuilt after the 1882 flood,
relying on machine power rather than manpower, withstood flooding in
1884. A severe flood in 1927, however, was again disastrous for
the lower Mississippi River Valley, and led to the federal Flood Control
Act of 1927 (amended in 1936), the nation's first law that addressed the
problem in a comprehensive manner.